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Show HN: Product Substitutes – what software top companies are replacing
- ayanb 9y agoSearch for the top alternatives for over 40k B2B software products. We’re doing a couple of things here that this community might find interesting: A) Actually tracking when companies start and stop using a piece of software B) Using this “switch” data to calculate a probability that the switches are a true substitution and then rank the top substitutes for each product - based on actual switching behavior. We use a weighted average where the switches are weighted according to how much the product’s categories overlap (every product is tagged with 1-5 tags). For example, Intercom and Drift are closely related so when a company stops using Intercom and starts using Drift that’s heavily weighted. However, a percentage of the companies who stop using Intercom and then start using Zendesk are effectively substituting Intercom with Zendesk. - You can use search to find a product, or start with the ones below: https://siftery.com/intercom/alternatives https://siftery.com/intercom/alternatives https://siftery.com/mandrill/alternatives https://siftery.com/mandrill/alternatives https://siftery.com/shopify/alternatives https://siftery.com/shopify/alternatives https://siftery.com/wordpress/alternatives https://siftery.com/wordpress/alternatives https://siftery.com/lever/alternatives https://siftery.com/lever/alternatives https://siftery.com/icims/alternatives https://siftery.com/icims/alternatives Note: There’s switch data for roughly 1k products (out of a total of 40k)
- zitterbewegung 9y agoI tried https://siftery.com/aws-lambda/alternatives https://siftery.com/aws-lambda/alternatives and it pulled up the serverless framework . Why does it say that the serverless framework is something that runs on top of AWS lambda not a replacement? Or does it mean to use straight AWS lambda without a framework? I like the idea of the site and I have used similar sites in the past.
- ayanb 9y agoA great use case where we can increase the granularity of categorization/tagging and potentially separate the infrastructure provider and the implementation layer on top of it.
- pbhjpbhj 9y ago>"When companies stop using WordPress, its most frequent substitutes are HubSpot Website Platform (32.6% of the time), followed by Drupal (21.9%), and by EPi Ektron CMS (6.9%)" (https://siftery.com/wordpress/alternatives https://siftery.com/wordpress/alternatives) // I don't understand why the first listing Craft CMS isn't one of the hot alternatives that people switch to as mentioned in the prose? Why is it even in there? Why is the third hot substitute not even in the list below of alternatives? I'm clearly missing something major here?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- ggiaco 9y agoWhat we're doing with Substitutes is to complement the NPS ranking with a mapping of actual switch behavior. It's entirely possible that a lower-rated product is a much more popular substitute for a product if it's a better fit (e.g. targeting SMBs or Enterprise). An example: In the Recruiting/ATS space, Greenhouse and Lever are each other’s most significant competitor. Meanwhile, companies looking to replace iCIMS by far most frequently end up using Oracle Taleo (and vice versa) We generally see company size and employee count is highly predictive of which products they’ll consider and we can see a progression as companies grow out of services catering to SMBs to more fully-featured alternatives.
- ma2rten 9y agoI am wondering: How exactly are you getting this data? How do you make sure the data is accurate?
- ayanb 9y agoSource of data: 0) We analyze products that have a public footprint. 1) We analyze products that don't have a public footprint. 2) For 0), we crawl the internet periodically and create a time series curves of B2B product usage for companies. 3) For both 0) and 1), our verified community has trained our algorithms with tens of thousands of data points on usage and sentiment, thereby reinforcing or nullifying these deductions. 4) If you have stopped using Angular and started using React (or vice-versa now that Angular 5 has better server-side rendering), it is deductible at a global context.
- holtalanm 9y agodid a search on React.js, got some results that I expected, and some that I did not. did a search on Vue.js, and the top 'alternative' is Bootstrap...... Yeah. Bootstrap isn't an alternative to Vue.js. They aren't even in the same wheel-house. https://siftery.com/vuejs/alternatives https://siftery.com/vuejs/alternatives
- leeoniya 9y agoyeah.... https://siftery.com/jquery/alternatives https://siftery.com/jquery/alternatives
- ayanb 9y agoAgree, need more granularity than just "Javascript MVC framework". Thank you, we are on it.
- ayanb 9y agoTagged it to Javascript Frameworks and the alternatives are much better now. Agree, we do need to split developer tools more granularly.
- cyberferret 9y agoThat was one of the first thing I noticed about this too - the 'alternative' pool is just too broad and in some cases nonsensical. For example - I searched for replacements for 'Intercom' because it is of particular interest to me, having gone through several support chat tools over the past 2 years. Most of the suggested alternatives were NOT in fact, replacements for Intercom. Some were product walk through demo apps (not really in app support chat and knowledgebase at all). Other suggestions, while being great front end web chat systems, were nowhere near the functionality of Intercom as far as back end app support chat systems and shared help desk features go. I know this from personal experience jumping from system to system over the past 24 months, looking for a viable alternative. (BTW - No affiliation with Intercom, apart from being a paying user 2 years ago, then a period of not using them, then back to using Intercom a couple of months ago due to not being able to find a good alternative).
- EliRivers 9y agoMicrosoft Word’s primary category is PDF Readers and Editors I did not expect MS Word to be listed as a PDF Reader (and editor). Does this mean that (according to your data) when a company switches away from MS Word, it's because they just wanted a PDF Reader? Perhaps that implies that those who don't switch away from it simply find that there is no substitute software for their principal use case.
- ayanb 9y agoApologies, this is data we will clean up soon.
- misnome 9y agoI can believe this to a certain extent; certainly the only reason most at our labs use Word on a week-to-week basis is to download and print forms distributed by the HR department, which should just be PDF. Where this data would come from/how this categorisation would be made, I have no idea.
- uyoakaoma 9y agoIs this similar to stackshare?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- ggiaco 9y agoDoes Stackshare programmatically track when companies start and stop using software products and run some calculations on top of that to predict the most likely substitutes?
- jessriedel 9y agoThis strikes me as the business version of AlternativeTo.net, a stupendous website to help find alternative (consumer) software. https://alternativeto.net/ https://alternativeto.net/
- ayanb 9y agoAlternativeto is great. _Siftery_Product_Substitutes_ is an attempt to analyze the migration of one product to another, across companies to begin with, and later across several other segments and industries. Where we don't have any switch data, we are only showing vanilla alternatives (sorted by NPS). This is merely v1 and we intend to iterate quickly on this dataset and provide more intelligence/decision support for buyers when they are looking for alternatives to switch to for a specific product or across a category.
- LanceJones 9y agoHow does a new entrant into a category get listed?
- ayanb 9y agoYou can submit products through this form - https://siftery.com/submit-product https://siftery.com/submit-product, our team will do a quick review, and push the product through if it's legitimate and live. We have 40K+ products in the DB, so you are in good company :)
- thisisit 9y agoOne of my pet peeves on the new products launched on HN has been a missing "About" page. If people are asking for personally identifiable information like emails etc, they should be open about who they are and what their competencies are in storing this kind of data. Secondly, I don't see an explanation for what exactly the promoter score is? Lastly, the source of data. While I am sure that is the secret sauce here, some of my personal fields have thrown up results which are far off the mark.
- teej 9y agoNet promoter score is a extremely common and very valuable gauge of customer loyalty to a product. It sounds dumb when you look into it but sometimes the simplest thing works and this is one such case. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Promoter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Promoter
- ayanb 9y agoYeah, NPS is a good way to understand how actual customers feel about a product. We have collected tens of thousands of sentiment over the last six months on a wide range of products, and at scale, this sentiment data set can be quite valuable.
- thisisit 9y agoYes I found the wikipedia page later but it was confusing the first time around. The second data point on customers is intuitive though. I just wish there was a "what is this?" explanation somewhere. Maybe a hover over text like the one showing - promoters vs detractors.
- krishmv 9y agothere's an about us on the footer? the landing page seems to be missing one though.
- ggiaco 9y agoYeah, we decided to de-clutter the LP (would you say we overdid it?), but the About Us link is on close to 1M pages throughout the site. Not hiding :) https://siftery.com/about-us https://siftery.com/about-us
- mholt 9y agoSiftery kind of annoyingly added my OSS project to it and started emailing me about it without me signing up for it... (months ago)
- ayanb 9y agoInclusions usually come from the community - users tend to add products to their stack, a lot of them obviously being OSS. We have tried to reach out to creators/admins in the past to understand if they'd like to represent themselves in the right way in front of a large buyer group. Apologies Matt - we'd love it if you gave the platform a try, but will not include you in any future email-campaign, going forward.
- dawnerd 9y agoHow about not emailing like that from the start without an opt-in?
- hobofan 9y agoYup, it's not just a dick move, but is also illegal in some countries (e.g. Germany) and can get you sued.
- yorwba 9y agoIANAL, but I think cold emails are still legal in Germany, provided they're not just advertisements (e.g. "someone added you as maintainer of [super awesome project]" is probably OK) and you offer a clearly visible option to unsubscribe (i.e. it shouldn't require posting on a random internet forum to get the attention of a company representative). In essence, the law prohibits business practices that are an "unacceptable nuisance". While advertising via email spam is clearly called out as such, not all cases are so clear cut and will depend on the judge's opinion of acceptable behavior. http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/uwg_2004/__7.html http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/uwg_2004/__7.html EDIT: English translation of the law: http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_uwg/englisch_uwg.html#p0100 http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_uwg/englisch_uwg....
- mariaesther111 9y agoThis is so cool, thanks guys :)!
- troydavis 9y agoSiftery has repeatedly engaged in Twitter spam. Here’s one example account, @SifteryHello that exists solely to mention other companies and individuals: https://twitter.com/SifteryHello https://twitter.com/SifteryHello Check out the tweet history to see what I mean. They sent thousands of tweets from this account (and very possibly others), solely to get visibility for Siftery from the customers/others who search for the company's Twitter handle. They take the same approach to other mediums. Regarding mholt’s comment, here’s another one: https://twitter.com/guusdk/status/909773952561696769 https://twitter.com/guusdk/status/909773952561696769 I can’t imagine ever trusting a company or person/team who does this. Update: Here's another medium that Siftery spams, albeit at a lower volume - HN itself: https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=ggiaco https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=ggiaco. ggiaco, an employee, submitted ~100 low-value Siftery pages about companies (rather than, say, the companies themselves, or sites he actually liked). Update 2: Here's a second Twitter account, @SifteryFeed, which does the same thing as @SifteryHello: https://twitter.com/sifteryfeed https://twitter.com/sifteryfeed. Example tweet: > "Are you using Apache Hive (@TheASF) and recommend them? You can do it here http://siftery.com/some-landing-page http://siftery.com/some-landing-page … "
- ggiaco 9y agoThe posts to HN that you're mentioning are interviews with founders/creators of the products. They're actually similar in nature to interviews posted from other sources (e.g. Indie Hackers). Here's an example: https://siftery.com/stories/monitor-online-mentions-of-your-brand-in-real-time https://siftery.com/stories/monitor-online-mentions-of-your-... I know when we post new ones, so I can add them here first. It's not the only type of content I post, and the HN community can decide if they're worthy of attention or not.
- troydavis 9y agoOkay. That addresses one update; how about the main focus of my comment, the thousands of low-value tweets that @ mention companies and people?
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- flipp3r 9y agoWebsites like this are completely useless once you know where to get real comparisons. Just go to Google and type in "<product> vs " and let Google's autocomplete suggest the top competitors. No need for sites like these.
- switchstance 9y agoI have been going to Crunchbase, looking up a company, and scrolling down to see their "competitors." Though, they're often not listed. But, I like your suggestion and will give it a try in the future.
- sharemywin 9y agoexcept how do you think google mines that data. if those sites go away so does google's free loading....
- hobofan 9y agoGoogle mines that data by other people searching for that, not (only) by scraping it off sites. Yes, they also do that, but AFAIK search trends have a higher relevance than scraped suggestions. As long as people want to know how their existing product stacks up against another product they have heard of before, "<existing product> vs <other products>", will be searched and appear in the autocomplete. This approach breaks down tough for newer products, ot if you want to find the best product by quality, not just popularity.
- ggiaco 9y agoA Google search will generally turn up sites like Siftery, among others ('A vs B' is one of our very top organic search traffic drivers). Hope you'll take a look at the substitutes data specifically though. We're showing companies that are actually switching from one product to another, and then rolling that up to showcase some trends and insights.